Happy Birthday Sir Patrick Stewart!

Last Wednesday, I stupidly dropped my iPhone in the bath, and my life has sort of spiraled almost out of control.

Ich musste feststellen, dass ich nicht die Art von Schauspieler bin, dem die amerikanische Filmindustrie dabei hilft, eine große Karriere aufzubauen.

One day, out of irritation, I said, you know all of those years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, all those years of playing kings and princes and speaking black verse, and bestriding the landscape of England was nothing but a preparation for sitting in the captain's chair of the Enterprise.

Was Star Trek angeht, habe ich gemischte Gefühle - wie bei einer Romanze, die vorüber ist.

I wasn't campaigning for a role in a Hollywood television series, it was a fluke. So you've got to have a measure of good luck, you really have, being in the right place at the right time.

It is what you do from now on that will either move our civilization forward a few tiny steps, or else... begin to march us steadily backward.

Having played many roles of scientific intellect I do have an empathy for that world. It's been hard on me because flying the Enterprise for seven years in Star Trek and sitting in Cerebro in X-men has led people to believe that I know what I'm talking about. But I'm still trying to work out how to operate the air conditioning unit on my car.

I would like to see us get this place right first before we have the arrogance to put significantly flawed civilizations out onto other planets, even though they may be utterly uninhabited.

I've met actors where you think, if only you could just clean up your act and get it together, people would want to work with you. Some people are so difficult, it's just not worth working with them.

I've often reflected on this in the past weeks as I've been following the presidential campaign: Very often, I thought it would have been great for both of these guys to sit down and be force-fed a couple of dozen episodes of Star Trek.

The only still center of my life is Macbeth. To go back to doing this bloody, crazed, insane mass-murderer is a huge relief after trying to get my cell phone replaced.

I am not the archetypal leading man. This is mainly for one reason: as you may have noticed, I have no hair.

One of the things that I've come to understand is that as I talk a lot about Picard, what I find is that I'm talking about myself.

Whenever the lion fish in the fish tank in the captain's ready room died it was always a sad moment.

During my time we had two chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, at different times of course, on the bridge, both of whom asked my permission to sit on the captain's chair.

I don't do impersonations. I can do a wounded elephant! I can do a really good cow! And because of the amount of time I spent in North Yorkshire, I do a variety of sheep. All of which I will be happy to roll out for you!

I wouldn't know a space-time continuum or warp core breach if they got into bed with me.

The studio have always claimed that the ship is the star of the show, especially when they're renegotiating contracts.

I had come to the point when I realized it was unlikely that my film career was going to move beyond a certain level of role. And I was - because I had graphic instances of it - handicapped by the success of Star Trek. A director would say, 'I don't want Jean-Luc Picard in my movie' - and this was compounded by X-Men as well.

As the captain, I was going to be having the dominant role in most of the episodes, and that was appealing. I wasn't interested in coming to Hollywood to sit around.

Having spent so much of my life with Shakespeare's world, passions and ideas in my head and in my mouth, he feels like a friend - someone who just went out of the room to get another bottle of wine.

I never had teenage years. I guess because I was seen to be more adult than anybody around me.

I came to feel very, very sentimental about those sets, which is ludicrous, because they represent everything which is transitory and insubstantial. It's absurd that one should feel sentimental about timber and canvas.

Creating a believable world on the ship was very important, and technically they got better and better and better at showing the ship too.

For seven years I did very little theatre, and I have to make up some time.

I think I came back from America a funnier and nicer person than I went.

Wouldn't it be grand if we thought that theater could have that impact on the political life of a country?